


How to make a pearl

by Kitsune_Heart



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen, Headcanon, Homeworld is Horrible, and so am i
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-08-04
Packaged: 2019-06-21 15:27:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15560808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kitsune_Heart/pseuds/Kitsune_Heart
Summary: Here is how Homeworld makes a pearl:A gem makes a mistake.





	How to make a pearl

**Author's Note:**

> To the best of my ability, the natural and human-cultured process of pearl development is correct here. If you want to see a cool and also HORRIFYING video of the oyster grafting procedure, check it out here: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtYOwkwqWtw>

**Here is how an oyster makes a pearl:**

A grain of sand or a bit of food or some other debris finds its way between the shell and the mantle of an oyster. To protect itself, the oyster begins working at the irritation, coating it in a layer of nacre, the same material as the oyster’s own shell. The oyster makes that intruder a part of itself. The oyster keeps that imperfection, that transformation, that pearl, inside itself for as long as it lives.

* * *

**Here is how humans make a pearl:**

An oyster is selected.

And it is torn apart.

The shell, organs, and almost everything else is thrown away, but the tiniest sliver of tissue is kept. This bit, the mantle, is carefully cleaned and prepared and cut into dozens of little pieces.

Then another oyster is selected.

A speculum is placed between the two pieces of the oyster’s shell, the thumb screw turned, and the oyster is forced open. Carefully, a needle is used to pierce the soft tissues, and the harvested mantle is placed within the body of the host. Finally, a tiny sphere is placed alongside the harvested mantle, and the procedure is done. 

In just a few years, the host covers the implanted sphere in a coat of nacre. Once the farmers are certain their product has achieved a suitable quality, the oysters are taken up out of the ocean, removed from the nets, and torn apart, their precious pearls set aside to be evaluated and sold.

So much more precise, so much faster, so much more  _ efficient  _ than finding a pearl by chance.

* * *

**Here is how Homeworld makes a pearl:**

A gem makes a mistake.

Perhaps a little one. An unintended slight against a high-class gem. Going about their duties improperly. Being one too many of their kind to emerge that cycle.

Or perhaps a large mistake. Losing a battle. Disobeying a superior. Being somehow  _ wrong. _

And they are shattered.

Or harvested, as it were.

Sentenced and restrained and carefully examined, until a technician comes up with just the right plan.

And then, with a little tap, the most careful strike imaginable, the technician shatters the source, the core, the only  _ real, useful _ part of that defective gem. The body and the light and the screaming fades away, and all that is left is a few serviceable pieces of stone.

These are gathered, given some shaping, and taken to a world where the colonization process hasn’t  _ quite _ finished. Where some vestiges of life remain, perhaps in the depths of a polluted sea or within the last melting glaciers or huddling together in primitive shelters, no longer even daring to look outside at the powerful, magnificent creatures which their planet has produced.

The stones are placed in a special slurry and left there. 

A true gem will take hundreds of years to develop, requiring constant monitoring, and only so many can be created in a region before the surrounding life-force is spent. 

But a pearl needs so little. Barely-measurable ambient energy. A dozen years or so for the gem shards to be covered in nacre. Maybe the occasional checkup to fine-tune the slurry, if  you want to create something truly  _ special _ . And then someone to come when it seems like time should be up and sift the pearls out of the slurry. Nothing more, really. You wouldn’t want to waste resources on the process.

After all. They’re just pearls.


End file.
